EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
9.
I have experienced enough in the way of people's strange behaviors
to not be surprised by sudden breakouts of kindness, brutality, ten-
derness, betrayal, inconsistency, vanity, rigidity, schadenfreude and
its opposite. What does surprise me is current events. When 9/11
happened I was taken aback by such a freakish thing. (It was, to me,
no accident that 9/11 occurred on the other side of the millennium,
in 2001: No good, I thought, can come of the twenty-first century.
Not that the twentieth did not have its share of nasty surprises.) I con-
tinue to marvel at Republicans' seeming willingness to shut down
the federal government and allow the United States to default rather
than negotiate with the president. I don't understand my country
anymore: how, after a century of federal programs such as the New
Deal, social security, bank regulation, public housing, and food
stamps, a large swath of the population can still take umbrage at the
government's minimal efforts to protect the weak and the poor, or
indeed to have a presence in any aspect of life beyond the mainte-
nance of military force. Nothing prior has prepared me for this
frightening swerve. I grew up in the postwar atmosphere of a mod-
estly progressive welfare state, where problems such as racial segre-
gation and poverty were expected to be addressed as the governmental
level, and I assumed naively that we were marching at best or creep-
ing at worst toward a more just society. What I took for an inevitable
historical progression turned out to be an anomalous blip. I might
better have looked in Nietzche's theory of eternal recurrence. Today
I am less experienced, less able to adapt to this harshly selfish envi-
ronment than the average twenty-year-old, who has grown up with-
out my New Deal-Great Society set of expectations.
________________________
Phillip Lopate
A Year and A Day
NYRB 2023
